Vanity Analytics are Not the Real World
A person’s perception, being their reality, is what digital marketing magicians have been counting on since SEO (search engine optimization) became a buzzword. How many visitors a digital marketer could get to a person’s website dictated the size of their crown. It’s kinda like how in the old days marketing folks sold saturation and penetration and the all important “Arbitron” ratings. Retailers and service providers alike drank the kool aid and were thrilled that so many eyes were on them, regardless of who was looking, because they knew if they were getting enough attention that business would be good. Even if business was slow, they believed they were doing all they could by driving people to their website where people could read all about their many products and/or services. They then could leave the inquiries up to the temperature of the marketplace and the “call in” and “walk in” gods. I hate to break any hearts here but… there are no “call in” and/or “walk in” gods. EVERYBODY is online but some outliers. Your floor traffic, as you have witnessed, has a larger than ever portion of folks that have done some research. Some don’t know it, but they still need a specialist to guide them and put things in context, but they are armed with more product knowledge from the net than ever before.
Recently, retailers have been barraged with a plethora of digital marketing acronyms such as:
SERP, CTR, TLS, CMS, PPC, CPC, BR, CRO, ROAS, CPM, MoM, YoY, GA, GTM, and GMB to name a few more frequently used ones. Retailers get invited to digital marketing meetings where job #1 is to make the client feel grateful to have someone on their team that can decipher and put these things to work for them, when actually if you look them up they are mostly code for very independently simple items. Take the last one for instance, “GMB”, which simply means “Google my Business.” These digital magicians have created a pitch that encourages their clients to feel good about things that are important even if the statistics don’t deliver! Enter “Lead Generation”, the new KING of digital marketing, that is exposing one pretender after another when they don’t help sales grow with their fancy, preliminary, linear thinking numbers. Might I add that these numbers are preliminary to NOTHING if there does not exist an adequate harvesting tool… which in the old Madison Avenue days we referred to as a “mousetrap.”
The real world is this; sales professionals need someone to talk to. These days, conversations start online but the reality still exists that they need someone in dialogue with them to manifest a sales opportunity. In our new normal, print media now supports digital activity whereas it used to be the other way around. Your digital footprint needs to take into consideration conversion of traffic more so than impressions. Pianos, being a niche market, are best sold with targeting which has sufficient audience intelligence because throwing enough mud against the wall to see how much sticks is a poor way to spend ad dollars. Just because you may be able to afford something doesn’t make it a good idea, right? The way to be sure your people have people to talk to is to concentrate on lead generation and the elements that make that happen, as opposed to typical agency analytics that you can’t take to the bank. Harvesting contact information is what we do here. A page optimized for conversion is worth a gazillion forms that people don’t care to fill out. You must organize and use the “audience intelligence” well, target well, and motivate people to give you their personal information well enough to want to engage.
Allow me to break it down and summarize: first you place an ad with a history of success in front of the right people, then you drive them to a landing page optimized for conversion, and then you give them something of value that makes them want to begin a relationship with you. What this in essence means to you, the retailer, is that you can flush all the rest of the numbers and save them for an annual review. What needs to be reviewed regularly, monthly we suggest, are these items: how many ads it took to get a page view, how many page views it took to create a lead and how many your sales staff turned into bona fide sales opportunities, the majority we hope are “in person” appointments. These CTR’s (click through rates), which I categorize under the umbrella of “critical conversions”, are what matters most. The digital magicians can spin the narrative however they want to keep you on the hook as long as they can, but the REAL WORLD is that if a digital marketing entity does not deliver multiple, workable leads to your doorstep on a regular basis, they are probably bright and intelligent humans with no feel for the application of their talents because they don’t know enough about, because they haven’t experienced first hand, the “end game.”
I could tell you story after story of retailers who employed brilliant people to be in charge of their digital marketing for a short period of time until they realized that they were having to teach the local marketing people their industry, which in our case is the piano business. After months of investing time trying to teach the piano business to digital marketers, who haven’t sold or played music, they moved on. A small portion of our clients actually left and came back after realizing that what we excel in cannot be duplicated without a deep understanding of what really counts. They came to realize that we could provide their sales staff with real sales possibilities and not just fancy reports and analytics.
In summary: Whether you decide to try and do it yourself in-house, hire an agency from your town or Mumbai, or most admirably us, the report card should be:
Who did they target and how?
Did they capture/harvest a significant amount of quality leads?
and
Did they give my sales associates what they needed to sell successfully?
Ads to page visits, page visits to leads generated and leads needed to create a sale. These are NOT vain numbers – these are what you need to track in order to assure that your faith in any digital agency or strategy is justified. In closing, I’ll put our numbers up against anybody’s. We have created more “piano interest” leads than any entity in the history of the piano industry. Call us and find out if our exclusive services are available in your area and we’ll show you the REAL WORLD of lead generation.
“Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic” – Edward de Bono
Jack is a thirty year marketing and sales veteran with an insatiable appetite for contributing to the sales success of others. After leaving Cox communications in the late eighties Jack has serviced clients such as: Goodyear, Allstate, Verizon Wireless, Steinway & Sons, and numerous independent businesses. His knack for creating targeted strategies has endeared him to clients who he has been privileged to service in many instances for over two decades.
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